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Visual Studio '11' Announced

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Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#91

Post by MartinCron »

oleganza wrote: post #20

Interesting thing about VS and Xcode is that they do not really try to compete with somebody or fight for attention. Both Windows and Mac/iOS developers would use less useful tools if they still let them make products for the popular platforms. JetBrains, Borland and others are fighting for attention and developers' love. They must try really-really hard to make people choose an alternative to the official tools. So…

I personally think that Microsoft should stick with things that only Microsoft can do, and leave the more cutting-edge innovations to others.

Example: the test automation tools into Visual Studio were terrible. Maybe they still are, I don't know, I've stopped using them. nUnit is just better. Their automated refactoring stuff may be OK, but the stuff from JetBrains is much, much better. Don't get me started on Team Frustration Server.

If they want to simplify and clean up their UI by starting with lower contrast icons to make the IDE background and the code foreground, that's totally a step in the right direction.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#93

Post by fryguy »

huhtenberg wrote: post #83

I might be an old fart (close to 20 years of Windows programming), but all I see is bloat. A compiler, a linker, a debugger. An editor with syntax highlighting, Ctrl-F and Ctrl-H. That's it, this is pretty much all that I ever use in VS. Even plausibly useful features like Intellisense and IDE macros end up being more of a hindrance than a help. What am I missing? What is there in the remaining 80% of VS that I am no…

Go to definition, Find all references, and variable rename are far superior to ctrl-f and ctrl-h because they operate on symbols rather than strings. When you highlight a variable and ctrl-f for it, you're going to find the 30 times the function is used (if it's even in the same file), whereas hitting f12 takes you right to the definition of it. Symbol renaming is much safer, since you don't have to worry about renaming "i" to "itemIndex" when a loop gets more complicated, and having misc things blow up in your face. Intellisense is really great when you're not entirely sure what order parameters go in, since it shows you what's important as you're typing. I've found them extremely valuable when working on large projects with multiple team members, since a lot of the times I won't have worked on the functions I'm calling to know them intimately.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#94

Post by MartinCron »

Reading this article and the comments made me realize that I never ever use the toolbar buttons and I only sometimes use the menu. For all of the main things (build/debug/run, cut/copy/paste, save, close window, etc.) I either use the Visual Studio or ReSharper keyboard shortcuts.

So I've turned the toolbars off and now have a few hundred more vertical pixels to work with. Nice.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#95

Post by MartinCron »

algoshift wrote: post #84
oleganza wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key was "try". Xcode is far from being focused on "consumers" and they are trying hard to make a kick-ass IDE. It could be a different definition of "kick-ass" from yours, that's fine. Anyway, I emphasize this again: it's not a question if the actual result is better or worse, it's a complex question because there are thousands of people to evaluate it. The question is why not to experiment more where you have mo…

>It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users Excel is another of my favorite "Why did they do that?" examples. In my opinion, MS absolutely ruined Excel somewhere in the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. If you were a power user with Excel'03 you felt like a total idiot with Excel'07. And, this wasn't a matter of a few buttons here and there. The thing was almost utt…

I use Excel extensively for automated code generation.

I'm not going to argue if this is a good thing or a bad thing to do, but even you have to agree that this is an extremely rare thing to do, and something that would be more or less impossible for Microsoft to anticipate you doing.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#96

Post by to3m »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #68
dav-id wrote: post #31

It looks like they are implementing the functionality from a lot of the plugins available for VS2010 and making them standard functionality. My biggest issue with VS2010 is the amount of memory it consumes. I hope they do something about that or some how let me disable functionality that I don’t need so I can reduce the footprint. Some of the icons in the screenshots do in my mind look to be an improvement whilst oth…

>My biggest issue with VS2010 is the amount of memory it consumes RAM is so cheap now that there is really no excuse for developers to skimp on it. I would rather hope that they work on improving the product in other areas than optimize it for 1GB. If there are leaks however, they need to be addressed.

VS2010 is still a 32-bit app. This puts a limit on just how much RAM it can use. I for one might be a little less alarmed by (though probably no more happy about) its carefree attitude if it were a 64-bit app.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#97

Post by algoshift »

MartinCron wrote: post #95
algoshift wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users Excel is another of my favorite "Why did they do that?" examples. In my opinion, MS absolutely ruined Excel somewhere in the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. If you were a power user with Excel'03 you felt like a total idiot with Excel'07. And, this wasn't a matter of a few buttons here and there. The thing was almost utt…

I use Excel extensively for automated code generation. I'm not going to argue if this is a good thing or a bad thing to do, but even you have to agree that this is an extremely rare thing to do, and something that would be more or less impossible for Microsoft to anticipate you doing.

Of course. This was just one illustration of Excel as an augmentation tool. There are probably thousands of such special applications out there, some commercial, some not, that used Excel this way.

The greater point, perhaps, is that making things prettier at the expense of raw functionality isn't always the best idea.

For the record, on first inspection I like the outer appearance of VS 2011. I like the pictographic icons and clean uncluttered appearance. I hope that this effort did not come at the expense of function elsewhere. We'll upgrade when it comes out of beta and see.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#98

Post by bjg »

MartinCron wrote: post #94

Reading this article and the comments made me realize that I never ever use the toolbar buttons and I only sometimes use the menu. For all of the main things (build/debug/run, cut/copy/paste, save, close window, etc.) I either use the Visual Studio or ReSharper keyboard shortcuts. So I've turned the toolbars off and now have a few hundred more vertical pixels to work with. Nice.

FYI if you want to get ride of the menu you can also have it hide. http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/bdbcffca-32a6-...

It's nice, especially in full screen mode.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#99

Post by bjg »

huhtenberg wrote: post #83

I might be an old fart (close to 20 years of Windows programming), but all I see is bloat. A compiler, a linker, a debugger. An editor with syntax highlighting, Ctrl-F and Ctrl-H. That's it, this is pretty much all that I ever use in VS. Even plausibly useful features like Intellisense and IDE macros end up being more of a hindrance than a help. What am I missing? What is there in the remaining 80% of VS that I am no…

VS Tips and tricks blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/zainnab/

Tips and Tricks session from two VS project managers at the Build conference: http://channel9.msdn.com/events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-830T There are some pretty cool things in there.

In my mind it's the same thing with vim/emacs. You only use what you know, it's not that the other pieces aren't useful.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#100

Post by nonsensical »

MartinCron wrote: post #95
algoshift wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users Excel is another of my favorite "Why did they do that?" examples. In my opinion, MS absolutely ruined Excel somewhere in the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. If you were a power user with Excel'03 you felt like a total idiot with Excel'07. And, this wasn't a matter of a few buttons here and there. The thing was almost utt…

I use Excel extensively for automated code generation. I'm not going to argue if this is a good thing or a bad thing to do, but even you have to agree that this is an extremely rare thing to do, and something that would be more or less impossible for Microsoft to anticipate you doing.

I will argue, as I don't know who the submitter is, or even what this site is. HackerNews I think? I just got here via a Twitter post. So I have nothing to lose.

If you're using Excel for automated code generation, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG

Surely there are better tools out there for the task.

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